CLIENT CASE STUDY

Corporation for National and Community Service: Streamlining organization, operations and management

OVERVIEW

The Corporation for National and Community Service is an Executive Branch federal agency that fosters service as a solution, administering national programs such as Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America.

The Corporation engaged Accenture to help the agency realize the promise of the Serve America Act, by developing a roadmap to strategically manage rapid growth—thus ensuring that its organization remained focused on this critical service mission, as opposed to internal operations.

OPPORTUNITY

The Serve America Act of 2010 significantly expanded the Corporation’s scope and budget, and established aggressive performance targets. Specifically, the Act called for the Corporation to triple the number of AmeriCorps volunteers by 2017, launch multiple new programs nationwide and manage a 30 percent increase in its 2010 fiscal year budget. The Corporation asked Accenture to help it develop a roadmap by which it could achieve these goals most quickly and effectively.

SOLUTION

A multidisciplinary team from Accenture worked with the client organization to develop an integrated roadmap to building capabilities in three areas: process, people and technology. In developing the roadmap, the team first defined key objectives. These included aligning the Corporation’s mission with its operations, optimizing its program execution, streamlining the management structure and leveraging technologies to improve service effectiveness.

With the objectives in place, the project followed a structured approach. Phase 1 involved defining stakeholder needs, and conducting a strategic value stream assessment and functional analysis of existing processes and operations. Phase 2 focused on identifying critical gaps between existing and desired agency performance. In Phase 3, the team developed organization and management recommendations, established an implementation plan, and refined the implementation infrastructure. In addition, the Accenture team facilitated multiple steering committee workshops to help shape the recommendations and gain early endorsement from the Corporation’s leadership.

RESULTS

Accenture’s final report comprised five key recommendation areas to improve the organization’s governance and structure, processes, innovation capability, management approach for national service participants, and grantees’ and sponsors’ involvement. Accenture also delivered a high-level roadmap to achieve each improvement. The roadmap contained proposed implementation plans, cost estimates, change management best practices, program management tools and risk management considerations.

The Corporation has moved forward with implementing many of the recommendations put forward by Accenture and is already seeing results. Today, the Corporation enjoys more streamlined operations and more efficient and effective management capabilities. These improvements are creating a sound foundation for rapid growth and high performance.